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Lift force of viscous origin is widespread across disciplines, from mechanics to biology. Here, we present the first direct measurement of the lift force acting on a particle moving in a viscous fluid along the liquid interface that separates two liquids. The force arises from the coupling between the viscous flow induced by the particle motion and the capillary deformation of the interface. The measurements show that the lift force increases as the distance between the sphere and the interface decreases, reaching saturation at small distances. The experimental results are in good agreement with the model and numerical calculation developed within the framework of the soft lubrication theory.

Domain decay is at the heart of the so-called evaporation-condensation Ostwald-ripening regime of phase ordering kinetics, where the growth of large domains occurs at the expense of smaller ones, which are expected to `evaporate'. We experimentally investigate such decay dynamics at the level of a single spherical domain picked from one phase in coexistence and brought into the other phase by an opto-mechanical approach, in a near-critical phase-separated binary liquid mixture. We observe that the decay dynamics is generally not compatible with the theoretically expected surface-tension decay laws for conserved order parameters. Using a mean-field description, we quantitatively explain this apparent disagreement by the gradient of solute concentrations induced by gravity close to a critical point. Finally, we determine the conditions for which buoyancy becomes negligible compared to capillarity and perform dedicated experiments that retrieve the predicted surface-tension induced decay exponent. The surface-tension driven decay dynamics of conserved order parameter systems in the presence and the absence of gravity, is thus established at the level of a single domain., Comment: 4 pages (main text) + 8 pages (SM); Accepted in PRL

In this chapter, we consider the problem of a non-Markovian random walker (displaying memory effects) searching for a target. We review an approach that links the first passage statistics to the properties of trajectories followed by the random walker in the future of the first passage time. This approach holds in one and higher spatial dimensions, when the dynamics in the vicinity of the target is Gaussian, and it is applied to three paradigmatic target search problems: the search for a target in confinement, the search for a rarely reached configuration (rare event kinetics), or the search for a target in infinite space, for processes featuring stationary increments or transient aging. The theory gives access to the mean first passage time (when it exists) or to the behavior of the survival probability at long times, and agrees with the available exact results obtained perturbatively for examples of weakly non-Markovian processes. This general approach reveals that the characterization of the non-equilibrium state of the system at the instant of first passage is key to derive first-passage kinetics, and provides a new methodology, via the analysis of trajectories after the first-passage, to make it quantitative., Comment: 22 pages, invited chapter for the book "The Target Problem" (Eds. D. S. Grebenkov, R. Metzler, G. Oshanin)